Category: Life

Hilo on a Saturday, Coconut Island on the bridge, thoughts.

Erika Ginnis

On the bridge to coconut island today, (Moku Ola, one of my favorite places to stand & think) entertaining deep, not entirely pleasant thoughts, but my thoughts nonetheless.

Doing this while watching kids jump off into the water…Watching the water…watching the minnows…Watching the world around me. Big tall guy, maybe a visitor to Hilo, walking on my side of the bridge looks like he might walk into me, doesn’t but passes behind me then stops & stands on my left. Asks me (in his slightly or maybe very tipsy voice) “Are you OK?”

(Says it almost as if he feels like he’s worried I might jump? Me wondering if he has been watching the kids jump off this very low bridge over and over. Probably not.)

He says “It’s just good to ask”.

Me, (even though I agree with that sentiment in principle) immediately establish my “don’t mess with me wall”, look directly at him and say “I’m good.”

To which he replies “OK I’ll leave you alone.” Which was the correct response on his part.

Interesting interaction. So many ways I might answer if it was someone I felt like I could answer.

Yes. No. Maybe. Right now I’m pondering deep thoughts. I’m looking at the water & thinking about how much I sometimes still seek approval and belonging. I’m dealing with aging. I just came from Pride that was a drive through event, which was deeply surreal and felt at once really good and really lonely.

I feel a little bad that I have to activate the iron wall, bad that I know from experience that to not do that in this situation (per intuition) rarely ends well. Part of me wanting to reward some level of caring. Wanting to say “I don’t know if anyone you ask that question these days, being completely honest in the social sense can truly answer in the affirmative”.

Maybe I reminded him of himself, maybe he was hoping to get lucky, maybe he was bad news. I wasn’t interested in a long enough conversation to find out.

I do however, appreciate any of his motives that were altruistic, since I might have had more of my inner workings showing on the outside as I was in mid-ponder.

And at the same time I would like to be able to have my thoughts uninterrupted while looking over the water. Which is usually the case.

So I took it as the Universe saying OK, you’re done, time to leave those thoughts for now. You spoke the truth, you are actually good. Nothing more to see here, move along.

Aloha and Blessings,

Erika

The Path Made Clear. Sunday talk given by Erika Ginnis, recorded at The Center for Spiritual Living East Hawaii on 5-24-2020

Erika Ginnis

This is from back in May, and you may have seen it then as part of the entire service. I have just the talk now as a video so I am going to be cross-posting 🙂 it’s 28 minutes long and even though two months seems like an eternity these days, I believe it’s still useful and relevant. Blessings and aloha.

Hidden in plain sight. Changing our collective vision in isolation.

Erika Ginnis

Since I’ve been spending more time at home than normal; so true for most of us these days (I made sure of it when I quit my other job just before the world went into isolation/quarantine 🙂 ). I have been noticing the increased frequency of the interesting, and not at all unheard of, experience of looking for something that I just know I have, that I remember putting in a particular place, and yet not finding it.

Also knowing it will eventually turn up (well only mostly knowing that, to be honest).

Then getting into some other project or trying to find something totally different (notice a trend here…nope not much for housework hahaha) and then finding the thing I’m looking for.

This has happened three times just in the last month. I found an Amazon Fire Stick that I spent hours looking for at Christmas because I had a friend I thought could use it. I KNEW I had it, I looked “everywhere” and it was not to be found.

A couple weeks ago (while looking for an AC adapter) I found it. On the shelf on my desk that is essentially at eye level(!!!). It was hiding in plain sight!

Two weeks ago I wanted to find my huge bottle of Turmeric that I knew I had (just having finished one, and knowing I had bought two way back when). I know where I keep my spices. I could not freaking find it. I started doubting that I had gotten it, thinking maybe I had used it all and not realized it.

Today when I was cooking I looked in the same place I looked before and sure enough THERE IT WAS (see photo with this post). It was also hiding in plain sight!

And now I’m looking for a bag of dice (ok I have three other bags…but this is the one with some of my favorite dice in it that I brought with me to Hawaiicon last year). Can I find it? Nope, not yet. However I did find the Turmeric and I think I may have found my adapter hahaha.

One could say that this is because I have reached the time in my life where I should just expect this hahaha.

I have also heard it explained (in a non-age related way 🙂 ) that it is the result of our vibration and that when we are out of alignment with something we actually can’t “see” it. Kind of like a radio not being tuned to a station, and once we tune to the vibration we can then see it, since we are on its wave length so to speak.

I’ve been taught that when we are trying too hard and using too much effort that it gums up the works on a spiritual level until we let it go, give up and then relax.

I have additionally heard it explained that our Oversoul (a term I first heard used in the Seth books by Jane Roberts), who is the one who keeps this version of our 3-D reality consistent day to day, forgot to materialize it momentarily, so we literally couldn’t see it.

This brings me back to our reality today (what day is it again?) when everything is in so much flux. I think perhaps the reason I’m finding these things all at once is partially due to not operating in a “business as usual” kind of way. (None of us are, we are navigating the ever changing waters of “nothing is as usual”.)

Maybe this is an indication of a larger trend, perhaps with the changes that are happening to all of us, in response to the viral threat, we are being jostled out of our normal day-to-day vision.

The vision where we see things as we think they are, just out of habit, rather than seeing how they actually are (or could be) in any given moment, possibly being out of phase with something. Maybe this applies to larger things.

What if there have been answers to long asked questions, inventions or cures or new approaches, that have been hiding in plain site, waiting for the right moment to be seen, just like my huge container of Turmeric.

I am really liking that idea so I’m going to go with it.

I’m not concerned at the moment whether that is due to a change in our collective vibration, so we line up with them; or our collective Oversoul making them easier to see in our virtual physical dimensional reality; or our collective and individual vision getting an upgrade. I just really like the idea of the things we are looking for being right in front of us all of a sudden.

Now if I could just find my old bag of many sided dice. I know it’s around here somewhere. (Grin).

Blessings and Aloha,

Erika

Art is.

Erika Ginnis

Art is terrifying. Words are easier, although still scary sometimes. Poems more so than prose. Yet both of them still come out more fully formed, and so come equipped with a thicker skin, or I do when I make them. My intellect stands guard in some way, gives me a little distance. Just enough to breath.

Art, visual especially, and music as well as I think about this, are different for me; maybe different forms are different for each person. The cliche’ of putting your soul out there unprotected for other people to view and judge, is very real. It’s why, I now realize, that I haven’t been doing as much of it or sharing anything I had done, until very recently.

This started to change when I had to confront my own mortality this year. When I had to make decisions about what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Questions I never thought the whole world would be asking itself a month or two later.

When I was growing up I was always a visual artist, I embraced it, was confident in what I did to some degree. It was part of my identity. I was less secure in music at the time, and spent more years refining those skills in college and after.

When I got older I still did visual art but it was more to accompany my other projects. I did things that didn’t focus on the art, I used it to frame and hold my other works. I’d add it to my book here and there or put it on a webpage in a graphic or an ad, on a video; use it as part of a class, always as an addendum to another project. I think I felt that unless I had the medium I was used to, I couldn’t really do it. So I’d doodle or add a flourish here and there, or I’d save it to a file somewhere. Now I know why.

Doing my art as it’s own end, it’s own creation, is terrifying. Well perhaps not the doing of it, but the showing of it, feels like being vulnerable in a way I have spent a lifetime avoiding. It’s like there is no separation, it’s not intellectual, it’s not teaching or explaining something, it’s not being “useful” in a “must go to work” societal way, it’s this raw expression, just a part of me that exists for no other reason than to exist. By showing it, even in a casual way, invites the possibility that no one will like it at all. Or that they will.

It’s about being seen somehow. I’ve always known this to be true on some level, but it was visceral today. When someone said they liked something, it was so surprising, and so joyous, I felt like tinker-bell coming back to life when someone clapped.

I can’t make art for approval it’s not why I do it, I do art because I love to do it and because, as I’ve learned, I have to do it to survive, like breathing. Even so, at the same time it’s amazing how vulnerable it makes me feel to share it, wondering if anyone will see me, confirm in some way that I’m real, even if, or especially if, I’m not trying to please them. Yep Art is freaking terrifying.

And that’s OK.

Erika Ginnis

April 3, 2020

Tree of Life Meditation by Erika Ginnis. Recorded at Center for Spiritual Living East Hawaii March 22, 2020

Erika Ginnis

Aloha All,

Hope you are safe and well and surfing the energy of the great waves of change.

Here is a short 6 minute Tree of Life meditation from a couple weeks ago, to help during these challenging times of incredible expansion even in the midst of our personal isolation.

Thank you Adam Lightplay​ for recording this and sending it to me, and for upgrading the sound from that Sunday.

Blessings and Aloha,
Erika